Given a blockchain, our goal was to create a list of every appearance of every address in any block on that chain. We define an “appearance” as either the use of the address in one of the common ‘address’ fields of a transaction (such as to, from, or contractAddress) or its use as data in one of the data fields in a transaction. We do not check numeric fields such as value or gasUsed.
A New Way to Think About Data APIs
When I was a kid, we used to play a game called “Mother May I”. In the game, the person who was it, called “Mother”, would stand on one end of the room and the players would stand on the other. The players would shout out things such as, “Mother, may I take one giant step forward?” or “Mother, may I take two scissors steps?” Mother would say either “Yes” or “No.” Players pleaded with Mother in random order. Mother had to say “Yes” more often than “No.” The first player to reach Mother became Mother, and a new game would start. Not exactly the most exciting game in the world, but we were kids so give us a break.
I like to count shit. I’ll count anything I can find. Cracks in the sidewalk. Pennies in a cup.
I also like to make lists. In fact, at one point in my life, combining my two passions, I was maintaining a list of over 350 rules related to how to pick up pennies without incurring bad luck.
Yes. I suffer a bit from OCD (but happily).
Recently, Pedro Gomes made a tweet asking if anyone had a list of the most frequently called function signatures on the Ethereum blockchain.
I wanted to share with you (through a series of charts) what happens when one releases a world-class data scientist such as Ed Mazurek on fresh-baked Ethereum difficulty data.
You get TrueBlarks (that’s a portmanteau of “TrueBlocks” and “R” in case you were wondering). If you don’t know about “R” and R Studio, you should. It’s amazing.
With little to no explanation, I am going to copy and paste the “R” code right next to the chart used to create it. Ask Ed what the code means.
When I first heard of Ethereum, I thought to myself “Excellent! I no longer have to keep track of my spending. Everything will be automated.”
Can you say “misconception”?
Not only is keeping track of Ethereum spending way more difficult than it should be, it’s actually so difficult that I stopped spending ether all together about two years ago. (The price of ether had a lot to do with it as well.)
I was recently included in a discussion about why it’s so difficult to get ERC20 token balances (and other data) from the Ethereum blockchain. I thought I’d take a crack at answering the question.
I think it comes down to four words: “Incoming”, “Internal”, “Transactions”…and “Decentralization.” I’ll focus on each word individually.
I’ll start with the easiest word first: “Transaction.”
Go into a bagel store. Buy a dozen bagels and get a receipt. Everything you need to know about your transaction is on the receipt. Date, amount, sender (from) and recipient (to). This is the same information you’ll find on every Ethereum transaction.
I spend a lot of time looking at historical Ethereum transactional data. I do this by scanning the chain using TrueBlocks.
If you’ve ever done this, you will be familiar with a certain set of transactions that take a very long time to process. These transactions happened between blocks 2,286,910 and 2,717,576. They are a pain in my a$$. See here.
In a surprisingly effective attack, some evil genius took advantage of an underpriced opcode to create millions of dead Ethereum accounts. This had the effect of significantly bloating the state database, but more importantly for our purposes it created tons of transaction traces.
I am so deep down the rabbit hole of Ethereum data that I sometimes forget there is such a thing as the real world. And I care exactly zero if I never come up. Don’t ask me why. I’m pretty sure there’s no good reason.
Maybe my obsession with this has to do with something that happened to me in high-school. My guidance counselor administered a test intended to identify which career I should pursue. She watched me take the test and then carefully scored my answers. When she was done, she looked across the table and said, “You should look for careers that have nothing to do with people.” The remaining options for me where making things (factory work) and information processing. I took the latter path.
We are pleased to announce the release today of the first of three white papers describing TrueBlocks: Faster, Richer, Fully Customizable Data from Programmable Blockchains. Additionally, we are announcing the release of an updated and improved website (http://trueblocks.io) as well as fourteen open-source command line tools.
TrueBlocks is a collection of software libraries, open source command-line tools, and applications intended to improve the ease and speed with which one may access data from the Ethereum blockchain. Given fast, easily accessible data, new use cases and applications such as smart contract monitoring, per-block accounting, and integration with business intelligence tools such as Tableau become possible.
In recent weeks, the price of ether has risen from around $10.00 US dollars per ether to hovering around $20.00 US in recent days. Needless to say, this has caused a lot of discussion.
We wondered if this increase in price meant that the Ethereum community was all of a sudden spending thousands of dollars more per day on gas. Or was it hundreds of dollars more per day? Or was it one dollar per day? Or even one penny? We had no basis to answer that question, so we set out to find the answer for ourselves.